The Paperchase (18 page)

MR DIAZ WAS SORRY
when I told him I would be leaving in about a week. I said I might be back the following summer, but secretly I felt this would be the last time I would ever visit.

‘I’ll have it winterised,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the police to stop by once a day. We don’t want another break-in.’

‘You might invest in a burglar alarm,’ I said.

‘I’ll put it to the trustees.’

‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘I came across this story while I was going through my uncle’s things. I’d like you to read it. I’d like to know what you think of it.’

He looked at me with a slightly puzzled smile. ‘May I ask why?’

‘I’d rather not say,’ I told him. ‘I’d like you to read it with an open mind. I found it somewhere that makes me think Patrick felt it was important.’

‘Moby-Dick
important, or Headline Rate of Inflation
important
?’

‘That’s why I wanted you to read it,’ I said, and he slapped my back and chuckled.

He met me the following afternoon at one of the harbour bars in Westwich. I had arrived slightly early and got a bowl of wilted-looking yellow popcorn and a pitcher of frothy lager.

‘Well, what did you make of it?’

He took a handful of popcorn from the bowl. ‘You trying to get me in trouble with my wife?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘“Her hand roused my naked yard to stiffness.”’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.

Mr Diaz snorted with laughter and a popcorn kernel got stuck at the back of his throat. ‘I was quoting from the story!’ he wheezed.

‘I know, I know. I didn’t want your opinion on his sexual braggadocio. What did you think of the rest of it?’

‘Well, it’s all kind of mixed up. I mean, one guy’s called Fernshaw, but the Fernshaw character’s called something else.’

‘Mundy. He transposed the names.’

‘Right. I’ll tell you another thing, from what my wife tells me, it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out Dicky Fernshaw was a thug.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘It was well known.’

‘Really?’

Mr Diaz nodded.

‘What happened to him?’

‘Drowned, I think. I don’t know too much about it. This is old island stuff. You should really talk to my wife. She was in high school with all the Fernshaws.’

I found myself too ashamed to admit to the thoughts I had been having about Patrick and had to resort to a fictional device to make me feel less uncomfortable.

‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I showed the story to an old friend of
Patrick’s and she was quite upset by it. She felt that the story wasn’t one hundred per cent fiction. I have no idea myself. She even – I know how ridiculous this must sound to you – she even thought Patrick might have been somehow involved in Mr Fernshaw’s death.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘No. That’s what she thought. I didn’t know enough about the background to it to tell her she was wrong.’

‘I mean,, the story is ten per cent jokes, ten per cent porno, eighty per cent whatever. But it’s not evidence that anyone’s killed anybody.’

‘It’s not evidence you could use in court,’ I said. ‘But it’s still a “confession”.’

‘That’s right. “The Confession of Sherlock Holmes.”’

‘Mycroft Holmes, actually. Sherlock’s older brother.’ It somewhat undermined my confidence in Mr Diaz that he couldn’t even get the title right and didn’t seem to have grasped that Sherlock wasn’t the protagonist.

‘Well, let me ask you this,’ he said. ‘Do you think Dick Fernshaw’s body is in a barrel at the bottom of the Thames?’

‘Of course not,’ I said. Mr Diaz was looking pleased with himself, as though this observation was conclusive. ‘The point is the story made her feel uncomfortable, and so I thought it was worth running past you.’

I knew that the inference I was putting on the story depended on being selective about what was literally true, but I found this difficult to explain to Mr Diaz. He had a point, of course. Wasn’t it either all true or all false? Then I would remember the haunting line in the story that began
And
I
beat
him
until
he
moved
no
longer
and get uneasy.

‘That’s my opinion, Damien. I majored in Business Administration, not English Literature. In fact, I got an F in Great Books. I can frame a legal document that’s watertight, but if you want literary criticism you should be talking to someone else. That sound funny to you?’

‘You remind me of someone,’ I said, thinking of my father.

‘I’ve lived on Ionia seven years. Fernshaw died before I even came to the island. I’ve never heard that there was anything suspicious in it. I’ll ask my wife if you like, but I’d say you’ve been on your own in that house for too long.’ He smiled at me to show it wasn’t meant unkindly.

‘It’s not my theory,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’re right. I just wanted to be able to set her mind at rest.’

‘If you really want the scuttlebutt on the Fernshaws, come by and talk to my wife. She’s an authority on island gossip. She’ll tell you what’s true, what’s not true, what might be true, and a whole lot besides.’

I WOULD HAVE GONE
to see Mrs Diaz sooner, but I had to go to the mainland to get a new US passport. I had promised Nathan that I would take him with me. He wanted to buy an inflatable boat from a shop in Hyannis. He had called it a turtle boat. I asked him what that was.

‘It’s a boat shaped like a turtle. It’s got feet and a head, and on the bottom it says, “Help”, in case it flips over, so the Coast Guard can come and rescue you.’

‘And what if you don’t need to be rescued?’

He shrugged. ‘You flip it over and get back in.’

My motives for taking him weren’t purely altruistic. I think I hoped to learn something from him that would allay my
anxieties
about his father. Whenever I was with him now, I found myself checking him over for psychological scars. Aspects of
his behaviour which had previously seemed mildly eccentric began to strike me as neurotic.

Nathan was meticulous about his appearance. Whenever the slightest bit of dirt touched him, he broke off whatever he was doing and went to clean himself up – even when he would inevitably get dirty again, minutes later. He spent so much time traipsing across the lawn to wash his hands that I had bought him gloves for outdoor work, which he never took off. Each time I saw him, he was wearing fresh clothes, which was a reproach and an example to me, who tended to wear the same paint-splattered clothes for days. He had a horror of insects and anything rotten: he would go to great lengths to avoid touching decayed apples with his hands, generally
spearing
them with a stick to propel them into the marshes. Once he shuddered and turned pale after he brushed against some cobwebs in the garage.

Occasionally, I found my mind wandering off in directions that were just plain crazy. At one point, I envisaged a murder scene where Nathan was reluctantly assisting his mother and sister dispose of his father’s body. Perhaps he had contracted his squeamishness from handling his dead father’s severed limbs.

But as soon as I thought about the real Mrs Fernshaw – plump and friendly, moving gracefully around her kitchen – I knew she was incapable of a violent act and felt slightly ashamed of myself. I knew nothing about Mr Fernshaw’s death. My idle brain had daydreamed a set of incidents that had no basis in reality.

At times, I wished I could unread the story. It depressed me. There was something grim and unforgiving about it – the way an intimation of death can make everything else seem
foolish
or inconsequential beside it. But like an ordinary depression, my anxious thoughts receded altogether
sometimes
. I had hours without thinking about it when I felt relatively happy. But I only had to remember the vivid and clumsy murder of Abel Mundy and the worries would begin again. As with the first fragment, something in the tone of it
was all wrong. The violent murder was as under-explained as Mycroft’s abandonment of Serena Eden.

My speculations weren’t confined to Nathan. I tried to fit his sister’s behaviour into patterns suggested by the story.

I built my obsession on tiny details. The innocuous Michael Winks made better sense as a partner for Terry if you
considered
that her father had been an ogre. Her insecurity, her eagerness to please her boyfriend seemed to point to a fraught relationship with the dead man. And she hadn’t hesitated about leaving me with Nathan on the day we went to the cinema – I put that down to an abused child’s antennae for a potential abuser.

I know they don’t mean anything – these observations were trivial. You could turn them round and use them to support a contrary argument. But the suspicion remained with me – like one of those obsessive worries which defeat all attempts at
reasoning
– that it might be based on truth.

Winks had hurt his foot and couldn’t drive. He was lying full length on the sofa in the Fernshaws’ TV room with his leg on a pile of cushions. Terry and her mother had gone into town to go shopping, he said.

‘Back-to-school sales?’

‘Yeah. Wish they wouldn’t call them that,’ he said, as he flipped disconsolately between channels. ‘Makes me feel like a prisoner on furlough.’

‘That looks like a bad sprain,’ I said.

‘Tell me about it. The Fernshaws are discovering that stoic fortitude is not my strong suit. Personally, I think these
shopping
expeditions are just an excuse to get away from me. It’s Nathan’s fault. We were playing wiffleball in the yard. I ran backwards for a pop-up and must have stepped on the side of my foot. Felt like I’d broken it.’

I told him I would be having a cookout before I left. It would have been Patrick’s sixty-fourth birthday in a week. I wanted to mark that and my own imminent departure.

I liked Winks. I wished I could show him the stories: I would have welcomed his thoughts. He might even have been able to ease my worries by pointing out some trivial
discrepancy
between the fiction and reality. He would have been an ideal reader, but if any part of the story turned out to be true, it would have put him in a difficult position.

Did I think Patrick had killed Mr Fernshaw? It was a
literal-minded
explanation of the story, I told myself. Equally, that didn’t prevent its being true. But what was truth in this case? I didn’t think that Patrick had ever had a boxing lesson; I was sure Mrs Fernshaw didn’t cook curry and had never been near the Indian subcontinent. I doubted Mr Fernshaw had ever had ‘oakum’ on his boots. Whatever that was.

But what was true was that my uncle was an isolated old man who was troubled by memories of the past. His
neighbours
were a deaf family, minus one father, who it seemed had been abusive to his wife and children. And these were all spelled out in the story.

It did violence to my memory of my uncle to think that he was capable of such an act, of course. I had never seen him so much as lose his temper, though I knew he was capable of it. I know that when his relationship with my father was at its nadir, my father was physically afraid of him. But this, I thought, was my dad being neurotic. It wasn’t based on a rational assessment of Patrick’s character.

To accept that my uncle would attack someone, hurt
someone
in a premeditated way, was to accept that I didn’t know him at all. I hadn’t accepted this, but just thinking about it, entertaining the possibility, made Patrick seem stranger and more remote. I wanted to exonerate him, if only so that I could have my image of him restored to its former innocence. Looking back, I suppose I was guilty of a kind of
sentimentality
.

When Patrick talked about writing, which he didn’t often, because he was superstitious, he sometimes said that a story was a way of asking a question so loosely that the writer
wouldn’t even be aware of its real meaning. I think he was afraid of those questions, the ones he couldn’t control, and which couldn’t be answered with any of the vast array of facts that he had stored up in his cranium. I think that’s why he had virtually stopped writing. Better to make lists, better to crack jokes, better to dazzle without any risk of self-exposure. It wasn’t surprising that the stories had stayed on his desk. Mycroft was a dangerous character. He was capable of getting all of us into trouble.

It was another overcast day. The summer was already entering island mythology as one of the worst in fifteen or twenty years. I felt now that the Ionians were taking a grim pleasure in each fresh spell of rain and would be disappointed if the weather took a turn for the better.

Nathan stood at the aft rail of the ferry watching Ionia recede into the distance as the engines churned the sea into froth right under him. Judging by the look on his face, he didn’t get off the island very much. I told him so. ‘It looks small, doesn’t it?’ he said. I told him it was small, then felt bad for saying it.

‘Which is bigger,’ Patrick had asked once, ‘Little England or Great Britain.’ And then: ‘Great Britain or the United States?’ I got the answer wrong in both cases. The gross disparity in size between Britain and the United States had come as
something
of a shock to me. Since then, America has always struck me as some kind of bigger and more glamorous younger brother. I think the Portuguese must feel the same away about Brazil. The younger brother who went away and made his
fortune
, while the older one stayed home and looked after the family farm. One night, there’s a knock at the door and it’s young Brazil, or Yankee Doodle Dandy, in a sharp new suit, flashing his money around and full of advice about how to modernise the cowshed.

I often had the feeling, though I tried to deny it, that England was tired and second-rate, and that it was precisely its
tiredness and second-rateness that fated it to be a significant part of my life. I could not identify with the superiority that Americans – even Patrick – took for granted. English people took pride in failure. ‘Good losers’, people said of the English – but that was because they had so much practice. Primacy was the American obsession. ‘We’re number one!’ And its sportsmen had developed a repertoire of gesture – high fives, clenched fists, chest bumps – as complex as Ionian sign for signalling their superiority. In England, low self-esteem was part of the national character, although it was partly concealed by our grandiose insistence on our glorious past.

I bought Nathan his boat from a shop in the Cape Cod Mall, a better-stocked version of the one on Ionia. I tried to persuade him to buy one that was more nautical, with little rowlocks and oars, but he wasn’t having any of it. I had to keep my own authoritarian tendency in check. I had a
prejudice
against the turtle boat. It was slightly effete. It was too young and gimmicky. It was a toy. I was being like my father, who refused to buy me the Wendy house I wanted for my eighth birthday and got me a pup tent instead. I realised that part of me wouldn’t be happy until I had cajoled Nathan into a mapping expedition in the sand dunes.

We had two hours before the next ferry crossing, so I
suggested
we go to the flea market in Barnstable. I don’t think Nathan even knew what it was, but he must have liked the sound of it.

It was bigger than I remembered. A faint drizzle lay
heavily
on the gathering; the air was thick and warm, like damp wool. The stalls were laid out in neat rows over several acres of wet grass. Nathan skipped off to examine a stall of rusty toy boats. Before he went I asked him to find out where we could buy some fleas. He gave me a pained look and rolled his eyes, and I watched him disappear into the crowd.

The vendors, who were retirees for the most part, sat in deck chairs behind their trestle tables, selling things that were not really antiques at all. A velvet reproduction armchair was
sprouting springs through the ripped fabric of its seat. It wasn’t antique furniture, it was senile furniture. There were little tins of gramophone needles, glass bottles, unloved LPs. If you were lucky, you might find a copper washbasin or a pair of snowshoes, but it would take a lot of searching.

This had been one of Patrick’s favourite places. The flea market was guaranteed to get him on to the mainland. He’d sometimes show up at the house in Truro before seven in the morning to take us along with him. Or he’d appear
afterwards
, the boot of his car stuffed with treasures which he’d show my dad in the driveway.

I rarely saw him happier than he was then, or at the flea market itself, his eyes bright with the prospect of imminent acquisitions.

Occasionally, when we were with him, we saw a book we wanted and he’d urge us to haggle. ‘Offer him five dollars for two.’ ‘See if she’ll take fifty cents for it.’ I had seen him walk away a hundred times from things he desperately wanted for the sake of a dollar or two, or because he found the vendor churlish. It wasn’t exactly meanness. The arbitrary budgets acted as a brake on his desires. If he’d been a millionaire, there would have been something else he would have forbidden himself, as though a thousand small acquisitions could take the place of a single, inadmissible desire.

I had lost sight of Nathan. Big fat raindrops had started to wash away the remaining charm of the flea market. Eventually, I spotted him far off, wandering among the stalls. Small and serious, he moved with the peculiar invisibility of a
well-behaved
child.

Then, more than I ever had at Patrick’s funeral or living in his house, I felt I had lost Patrick, and with him a chunk of my own past. It was strange that only a few months earlier my reaction to the news of his death had been: Patrick who? But in answering, or trying to answer, that question, I had
indirectly
found a new enthusiasm for my own life. I felt it was an insight that depended on understanding who Patrick had been,
how unhappy he had been, and how close I had come to
turning
into him. That recognition was a relief. I felt I understood that I had to live and trust people, not because people were innately trustworthy, but because the alternative was to turn into Patrick.

My father had said he lacked ambition. It was a
characteristically
obtuse observation. I didn’t believe it. I thought Patrick had been wounded in some way, and had surrendered to despair because he lacked the faith that anyone could help him out of it. It was how I felt about myself. Discovering that he’d saved my letters seemed to confirm our kinship.

But my reaction to his story, I realised, was a howl of incomprehension. Where did it come from, this violence? This violence that he tried so hard to legitimise.

If Patrick wasn’t who I thought he was, my optimism was founded on deceit. The empathy I felt with him was wishful thinking. And just when I should have been happy and excited about leaving, I felt as though the dark wing of some
nightmare
bird had come between me and the sun.

The reason I didn’t give up, then, and wash my hands of the whole business, was that I thought the truth might be more complicated. It was characteristic of me, and Patrick – and Mycroft – to know everything in advance. In my life, I have been trying to commemorate Patrick by becoming more unlike him. It’s an ongoing and never wholly successful undertaking, but a key part of it is the effort to renounce damaging
certainties
, to try to know a little less every day.